‘This shoreline was where Jesus spent some of his formative years,’ Helena said quietly. ‘In the Gospels, his sayings abound with metaphors of fishing and the sea. When he spoke of the red evening sky presaging a fine day, he was not being a prophet, but a sailor and a fisherman, someone who knew that dust in the air meant a dry day to follow.’
‘And people have come here to the Sea of Galilee seeking him ever since,’ Jeremy murmured. ‘Early Christians came after the conversion of the Roman Empire under Constantine the Great, the ones who created the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Then pilgrims of the medieval world, from the British Isles, from the Holy Roman Empire, from Byzantium. Harald Hardrada was here, leading the Viking mercenaries of the Byzantine emperor’s bodyguard, bathing in the river Jordan. Then the Crusaders, riding on a tide of blood, thinking they had found the kingdom of heaven, only to see it collapse before their eyes as the Arab armies rolled in from the east.’
‘I bet this place hasn’t changed much, though,’ Costas said, skipping a pebble along a shallow pool, then eyeing Jack. ‘Are you going to show us what you’ve got?’ Jack nodded absently, then looked back to where he had been staring at the man and the woman walking off in the distance by the shoreline.
‘Did you know Mark Twain was here?’ Jeremy asked.
‘Come again?’ Costas said, turning to him.
‘Mark Twain, the writer. In 1867, one of the first American tourists in the Holy Land.’
‘I memorized his words,’ Helena said. ‘I read them last time I was here, and they made a real impression on me. “Night is the time to see Galilee, when the day is done, even the most unimpressible must yield to the dreamy influences of this tranquil starlight. In the lapping of the waves upon the beach, he hears the dip of ghostly oars; in the secret noises of the night he hears spirit voices; in the soft sweep of the breeze, the rush of invisible wings.”’
‘There were others like him,’ Jack said, clearing his throat and taking a deep breath. He was still reeling from Jeremy’s news, and had been unable to suppress the bleakness he felt about Elizabeth’s disappearance, a feeling of culpability he knew was irrational. What had happened to her had been set in train the day she was born. He had seen it in her eyes when they were together all those years ago, only he had seen it then as something else. And yet, as he had watched the shoreline, the boats on the horizon, he had suddenly felt the weight lifted from him, a sense of peace he had never known before. Part of him seemed to accept Jeremy’s news as if he had known it all along. He wiped his hand over his eyes, then looked at Costas, who had been watching him closely. He clutched the slip of paper from Jeremy tight in his hand. In the face of despair, there was huge yearning, and an overwhelming responsibility. And he still had to hope that Elizabeth was alive after all, that they had stopped Ritter and his henchmen in time.
‘There were others who believed the stories in the Bible were not just allegory and fable,’ Jack said. ‘It was the time when archaeology came of age, when Heinrich Schliemann and Arthur Evans proved the reality of the Trojan Wars and the Greek Bronze Age. Ten years after Mark Twain, Lieutenant Horatio Kitchener, Royal Engineers, cut his teeth in Galilee with the Survey of Palestine, before becoming Britain’s greatest war leader. And then T. E. Lawrence came here studying Crusader castles, before returning as Lawrence of Arabia, leading the Arab legion over those hills towards Damascus. Great movements of history sweep past this place, and the biggest fracture line between the eastern and western worlds runs through here along the Jordan valley. But Galilee has so often been an eddy pool of history, a place where the individual can stand out.’
‘People who came here with the future ahead of them, on the cusp of greatness,’ Maria murmured.
Jack reached into his pocket and pulled out a small snap-lid box. He opened it and took out two coins. He held them up, one in each hand, letting the fading sunlight catch the portraits, the features accentuated by shadow as he slowly moved them from side to side.
‘It looks to me as if you’ve been borrowing again, Jack,’ Costas said quietly, still peering intently at his friend. ‘It’s a slippery slope to becoming a treasure-hunter, you know. I always wondered when you’d cross the line.’
Jack flashed him a smile, but kept silent, staring at the faces on the coins. He had needed to view them one last time, to reach out and touch them before opening up his bag and revealing what they had all come here to see. The coin on the left was a tetradrachm of Herod Agrippa, the one that Helena and Yereva had found in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The portrait was worn, but it showed a thick-set, bullish face, the image of a fighter more than a thinker, but with large, sensitive eyes. It was idealized in the eastern tradition, a Hercules or an Alexander more than Herod Agrippa. He wore a laurel diadem, normally only seen on coins of Roman emperors. The man on the other coin was wearing a diadem too, but this time rightly so. It was the sestertius of Claudius they had found in Herculaneum. Jack saw Claudius as he had imagined him sitting at his table in the villa, working with Narcissus and Pliny on his history of Britain, then standing before the tomb under London. He saw the full head of hair, the high forehead, the eyes set back and thoughtful, the pursed mouth. Not Claudius the cripple, not Claudius the fool, but Claudius the emperor at the height of his powers, an emperor who built aqueducts and harbours and brought the Roman world back from the brink of catastrophe, paving the way for the Christian west in centuries to come. Both coins showed men who had reached the pinnacle of their lives, a future they could scarcely have foreseen that day in AD 23 when they came here together as young men, beside the Sea of Galilee. Herod Agrippa, prince of the East. Claudius the god.
‘I wonder if they sensed the darkness ahead,’ Helena murmured.
‘What do you mean?’ Costas said.
Jack put away the coins, slipped the box back into his pocket, and then took out a swaddled package from his bag. The others watched him intently. ‘Herod Agrippa came from one of the most volatile dynasties of the east, and had grown up in Rome,’ he said. ‘He knew all about the fickle nature of power. Claudius was intimate with that too, and was also a historian. Even as early as AD 23 he would have seen the seeds of decay in the reign of Tiberius. And the one they met here, the fisherman from Nazareth, may have lived his life in Galilee away from the momentous events of history, but he may have known what lay ahead. When Claudius made his final visit to Britain to hide his treasure, he was doing it to last beyond Rome. And when Everett came to Jerusalem in 1917, he was doing the same. His world was one of terrible darkness, closer to apocalypse than Claudius could ever have imagined. And both men knew how the fickle winds of history might snatch away their prize.’
Jack removed the bubblewrap from the object in his hands and revealed a small stone cylinder. There was a murmur of excitement from the others, and both Helena and Morgan held their hands together as if in prayer. Jack held the cylinder out for Helena. ‘Will you break the seal?’
Helena made the sign of the cross and took the cylinder from Jack’s hands. Slowly, carefully, she twisted the lid. It came away easily, breaking the blackened resinous material that had sealed the join. She handed it back to Jack, who finished removing the lid. The others crowded round, Maria and Jeremy kneeling in front and Costas and Morgan peering over Jack’s shoulder. There was another gasp as they saw what was inside. It was a scroll, brown with age but apparently intact, still wound round a wooden rod.